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President Obama's three-ring scandal circus—with dangerous acts by the CIA and State Department; the Justice Department; and the Internal Revenue Service—threatens to overwhelm his agenda for the next 18 months, a laundry list that includes immigration reform, a grand deficit deal and corporate tax reform. A larger and more important question is whether or not the scandals will derail the Democratic Party's effort to win back the House and keep control of the Senate in the November 2014 mid-term election.

Political intelligence experts like Greg Valliere of Potomac Research were declaring the Obama agenda dead by Wednesday of last week, two days after the scandals erupted in full force. Congress had already shaped itself into a circus midway, promising weeks if not months of hearings. The president and his men will be selected and dissected.

Said Valliere, "Obama's agenda doesn't have a chance in this climate."

The climate deteriorated since then. Attorney General Eric Holder, under fire for the unprecedented seizure of phone records from the Associated Press in an effort to smoke out a reporter's source in the intelligence community, lost his cool during a grilling at a House Judiciary Committee hearing last week, led by California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, snapping that Issa's conduct as a congressman was "unacceptable" and "shameful." That hardly improved relations with the House GOP and probably negated any goodwill built in March when Obama broke bread with Senate Republican leaders.

Then there's the press corps, which had given Obama a five-year honeymoon. Suddenly, the Justice Department's massive foray into the AP's phone records has them circling him like angry hornets, eager to sting. Even the New York Times, which has not been shy about Obama boosterism, wrote an angry editorial about the attack on press freedom. This may be the age of digital social media, but, as the old saw says, it's still impossible to win a fight against the fellow who buys his ink by the barrel.

Obama hopes to take back the House from the GOP in 2014 so he can push the rest of his agenda through Congress, as he did with Obamacare. To do this, he needs to keep in place his the get-out-the-vote machinery that helped him obliterate GOP presidential challenger Mitt Romney last year. That includes major efforts to keep voters aged 18-32 interested and involved in politics. This so-called millennial generation, which includes whites, blacks, and Latinos, gave Obama the winning edge in 2008 and 2012.

Typically in a mid-term, the out-of-power party picks up seats because its members are angry and motivated, while the majority party is complacent. Obama in recent weeks has been asking wealthy fundraisers to pony up as they did in 2008 and 2012 to help him reverse this trend.

Will the young voters tune out because of the scandals? Michael Hais and Morley Winograd, who have written three well-received books on the millennials and their impact on the Democratic Party, believe the scandals will have almost no effect on this generation. For one thing, the millennials do not share their parents' suspicions of big, intrusive government. Hais and Winograd say that the millennials see a role for the federal government to set down rules of behavior, like parents, for them to follow.

WHAT ABOUT THE JUSTICE Department's seizure of AP's phone records? Millennials don't appreciate the concept of a "fourth estate." They don't read newspapers. They glean their information from social media. A book about millennials published last year by Paula Poindexter, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said that millennials describe the news as "garbage, one-sided, propaganda, repetitive and boring." Furthermore, she said, they don't feel that being informed is important.

Benghazi? They don't watch any television news, let alone Fox, which has been highlighting the topic. The IRS/Tea party story? They are pro taxes—that's why they voted for Obama. They are anti-GOP because the party stands in the way of the Obama agenda, which they supported. If Obama cleans up the bureaucracy, as he started to do last week when he tossed out the IRS commissioner, then that's good enough for them.

One thing that may keep them at home in November 2014 is the economy. Though the economy is recovering, young voters feel something more akin to a depression. The unemployment rate for people ages 18-19 in April was 22.6%. For ages 20-24, it was 13.1%.

Hais thinks the millennials have given Obama "an enormous grace period" because they are so turned off by the GOP intransigence on issues like immigration reform, gun control, taxes, gay marriage, and marijuana legalization. Says Winograd, "Values are driving their politics, not economics."

Hais and Winograd are two very smart men. Even so, I believe Clinton strategist James Carville's famous observation still holds true: "It's the economy, stupid."